The Lost Decade (1999-2009)

It has become fashionable for MSM to refer to the last ten years as a lost decade, a concept that they stole from the blogosphere where this term has been established since 2005-2006. In any case, here are a few MSM links..

For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different. The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation’s growth

The U.S. stock market is wrapping up what is likely to be its worst decade ever. In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.

Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) – U.S. stocks fell this week, limiting an advance that sent the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to its biggest annual increase in six years. The 2009 rally failed to rescue investors from the worst return for any decade.

What the last decade should teach us is that our elites have not simply failed. They betrayed us. They aren’t just incompetent. They are out to get us. We are in a class war which they started and which they mean to win. To this end, they have locked us into a series of perpetual crises: the War on Terror and now permanent financial crisis. For them it means endless opportunities to loot and consolidate their power. For the rest of us, it means crash after crash, each more expensive and destructive than the last. Yeats described the situation we now are in.

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea. Of course, the past ten years hasn’t been lost in the way that the next ten years might be. While much of the increase in wealth of the 2000s has proven to be illusory, the consumption the fake wealth purchased while the bubble lasted was not. While the good times rolled, many people did have good times. Even those not experiencing wage growth did all right, since as many have noted, consumption inequality over the past decade grew by much less than income inequality, thanks to growth in household debt. That’s obviously what helped get the country into this mess, and this mess could be quite serious indeed. It is striking to me how rapidly the gains of the past ten years, such as they were, have evaporated. The American economy is nothing like we thought it was, as it turns out.

The most pernicious effects of the bust, economists say, have been transmitted via banks and businesses. Banks found themselves loaded down with non-performing loans. Belatedly they faced up to many of their losses, restructured and consolidated. But according to Takuji Aida, an economist at UBS in Japan, long-term yields remained very low because of deflationary expectations, thereby flattening the yield curve (the difference between short- and long-term interest rates). That prevented banks from earning their way out of crisis, so lending remains weak. A weak culture of consumer borrowing means that people have been forced to rely even more on their savings, or those of their parents. But as society ages, growth in the stock of savings has dwindled. Savings are bound to fall as more people retire. For the younger generation the next decade may be even tougher than the past two.